TENDERLOIN DREAMSCAPES

Tenderloin Dreamscapes is a collaboration with photographer Michael Rauner to realize a long held vision of tying together an urban landscape with a supernatural vision of larger-than-life dream murals that could weave themselves though a re-imagined urban environment. These Dreamscapes work together to tease the viewer into believing that such an expansive vision of multiple, enormous murals could metaphorically “tie” an often overlooked urban landscape together with a visually compelling thread of conceptual, dream-scape murals. These murals are “drawn” on carefully prepared photographs of large, abandoned walls. In the street, these walls are often commodified with gigantic hung advertisements stretched like murals. In Tenderloin Dreamscapes, my collaborator removes existing advertisement in photoshop, then I playfully reclaim these walls.

The works in this project at first appear to be traditional documentations of vast murals on overlooked building facades. On closer inspection, they reveal themselves to be original works of ink on paper. Tenderloin Dreamscapes are works of ink on photographic prints that are presented as unique objects of art. The work is presented in two different formats: as medium and large scale prints and as an animated stop-motion video. In both presentations, the intention is to invite the viewer into a dreamscape that re-imagines a stark urban landscape as an interconnected web that is imaginative and enticing.